by Elizabeth Bishop.

Library of America. 979 pages. $40.

By THOMAS D’EVELYN

Special to the Journal

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems are like real people. It takes time to get to know them, but if you do, eventually, like them or not, they’ve changed your life.

Bishop’s poetry takes up about the first third of this Library of America volume; the rest is prose of varying kinds and interest — fiction and memoir, travel and literary pieces, translations and correspondence, some published for the first time. It is a bounty that fully justifies her inclusion in this canonical series.

Born in 1911 (she died in 1979), Bishop lived through much of the muchness of the American century. As acquainted with personal demons as any of the more famous American poets of the period, she left a legacy equal to any and perhaps more significant now than ever. For example, the difficulty of thinking for oneself, made even worse in our time by the imperial impersonation of the human voice, she brilliantly captures in her prose poem “12 O’Clock News.”

Bishop lived in Brazil for 15 years with Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, and was, for a time, happier than she had ever been. Her friendships with American poets, especially Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore, were deep and long-lasting, sustained by correspondence. Not surprisingly, geography was a central topic, and a certain distance, rooted in her shyness as well as her demanding intellect, her signature. “The Map,” chosen by Moore for an anthology the year after Bishop graduates from Vassar, is the first poem she keeps.

“Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” she wrote. “It takes great skill to make it seem natural.” The degree of her skill is seen in how easy it is to read her too quickly. The plainness of her diction indicates her search for truth: “The sky was darker than the water,” she writes in “The End of March,” “—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.”

Her rhythms, whether formal or informal, are quietly compelling. “Goodbye to the elms,/to the farm, to the dog./The bus starts. The light/grows richer; the fog,/shifting, salty, thin,/comes closing in.” She loved 17th-century English lyric, especially Herbert, and the gentle close of that stanza from “The Moose” reflects her patient devotion to the craft.

Her triumph, personal and creative, is briefly captured in the short late poem “Sonnet”: “Caught—the bubble/in the spirit level,/a creature divided;/and the compass needle/wobbling and wavering,/undecided./Freed—the broken/thermometer’s mercury/running away;/and the narrow bevel/of the empty mirror,/flying wherever/it feels like, gay!” BISHOP: Poems, Prose, and Letters,

tom.develyn@comcast.net